國立臺灣大學政治科學論叢

Abstract / Chinese PDF Download

Although the global wave of privatization has begun in the late 70’s, it is not until  the late 90’s that countries worldwide started their postal service reform, with the European Union being the world’s pioneer. Under the supervision of the EU, EU members were obliged to gradually reduce the scope of state-run postal service scope in order to achieve privatization while ensuring sound provision of universal postal service. Although Japan is not one of the EU members, postal reform was launched in April of 2003, and her first step was to transform the Postal Services Agency (PSA) into a public corporation. On October 1, 2007, the public corporation was privatized (in a broad sense) with the Japanese government being the sole shareholder, and it is planned to be fully privatized by 2017.

Studies show that the postal reformation in Japan has 2 significant features. First, privatization was done through conservative approaches in a step-by-step fashion. Initially, the PSA was transformed into a public corporation, then in order to split up the management horizontally, it was divided into different companies. Second, market liberalization was only realized in a nominal sense.  Although the postal service market was opened to all, there were significant barriers to entry for interested parties from the private sector. As a result, the public corporation maintained its monopoly within the postal service market. Moreover, Japan has chosen to internalized publicness in order to guarantee the provision of universal postal service, but if the postal service market is fully opened, the competitiveness and entrepreneurship of the new privatized company will be greatly influenced; therefore, there is a need to reflect on the postal reform process in Japan. Inspired by the postal reform experience in Japan, the author thinks that Taiwan postal service can be reorganized into 3 entities: keeping the general mail delivery as a government-owned business, while bank saving and insurance units can be transformed into private entities. At the same time, we should contemplate on how to ensure fair competition while guaranteeing the provision of a universal postal service.